by Tessa Hadley
—Grandma’s dead, Grandma’s dead, hooray, sang Daniel just under his breath, shoveling in spoonfuls of crispies. (He was only eight.)
—Don’t worry about him, said Joyce quickly, before Ray felt obliged to be stern. He’s just upset and doesn’t know what to say.
This gave Ray his pretext for transferring his irritation to Joyce, angry with her because he was so sorry she was hurt.
—He gets away with his sheer insensitivity and rudeness as usual.
Joyce looked at Ray as if she was seeing him from far off.
The children didn’t go to school. They spent the rest of the day at Zoe’s Aunt Ann’s; she had married a man in import and export and lived in an expensive flat in Hilltop with baby cousins that Zoe loved to play mother to. Cliff looked after them all while Joyce and Ann went to the hospital to get Lil’s things. Then they came back and sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and crying and making arrangements, talking on the telephone to Aunt Vera, who called from the school, worrying about Martin, who had refused to get out of bed that morning. Joyce had brought him home from the hospital last night; she hadn’t wanted him to go back to the flat on his own.
—There’s nothing left for me to do then, is there? he had said when she woke him up to tell him the news.
Since he had failed to finish his doctorate, he had been spending his days inventing things and building remote-controlled toys for the children instead.
Zoe fussed busily over baby Sophie, changing her bootees and woolly coat, filling her pacifier with rose-hip syrup, piling cushions so she could sit tilted crazily but gamely to one side in her playpen heaped with educational toys. (Joyce and Ray made fun of all the fashionable baby paraphernalia Ann had bought.) She worked perhaps even tiresomely (she felt it herself), playing peep-bo and pat-a-cake, to get Sophie to crack into huge toothless smiles for her, as if the smiles might constitute some kind of proof against disaster. When Ann took Sophie to the clinic to be weighed and to pick up her orange juice, Zoe went along. Somehow her aunt’s unhappiness seemed more approachable than her own mother’s, which she dared not even directly contemplate, because the fabric of the world required her mother to be believing and hopeful.
—At least, she said to Ann (who wheeled the pram rather fast into the wind, so that Zoe had to skip along beside her to keep up), at least you’ve got it over with now. I mean, you won’t have to dread its happening anymore. (Zoe had used this consolation to support herself through visits to the dentist or the breakage of favorite ornaments.)
Ann turned on her a bleak blank face.
—But it’s not fair, she said in fury. Just when she was coming up to her retirement. It’s so unfair!
Zoe skipped on beside the pram in silence, trying not to come anywhere near the real thought of beloved Grandma Lil lost to her, wrestled somehow obscenely away out of existence. Underneath all the protective wadding of kindness and reassurance that it was the business of adults to surround you with, there lurked this lethal truth, dangerous as a naked wire that you might at any time put your hand on by mistake.
After Grandma Lil’s funeral the family went back to Ann’s, where the children were waiting for them with Uncle Cliff. Zoe imagined that a cold wind from wherever they had been was clinging to the adults’ somber clothes. The women’s faces were framed in wet head scarves; a jumble of umbrellas leaked across the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall. Aunt Vera said loudly to several people that when it was her turn she didn’t care if they buried her in a cardboard box. An Auntie Selina had come down from the North, shepherding a man Zoe supposed must be her husband; Selina looked so like Lil—small and stout with rich brown eyes and hair and a tilting nose—that it was obvious every time Joyce caught sight of her she felt the shock of a hopeless hope. Selina wasn’t quite like Lil, though; she stared more pointedly around her like a sharp brown bird, she didn’t smoke, she didn’t spill over with news, she didn’t have Lil’s way of subsiding comfortably into the corner of a chair, managing glass and fag together in one hand. The man with her sat very upright and still on Ann’s beige leather sofa, his feet in giant shoes placed tidily together on the shag carpet, his brown creased skin stretched tight on his long bony head, his white hair so fine and light it wafted in the movements of air when anyone passed. Ann held his hand and called him Gilly and seemed extravagantly moved to see him; Zoe crept close to listen to his voice. She had thought this way of talking was special to her Grandma Lil (Vera sounded something like it); now she was discovering a whole tribe of relatives who made the same warm kind sounds. Uncle Gilly didn’t say much; mostly he was shyly refusing the food Ann pressed upon him.
—Go on, Gilbert, you may as well take something, it’s all very nice, Selina encouraged, busy with her plate. He’s only put off if he thinks it’s foreign food. You’d think he’d have got used to it in New Zealand.
Gilbert said softly that he didn’t mind if he had a piece of ham.
—Gilbert was Lil’s little favorite when he was a baby, Selina said. (So perhaps he was not her husband.) Isn’t that right, Vera? He used to call her Nolly. When she was in service and coming home on her day off, Mam would stand him on a chair at the window in the front room to look out for her, and he would start calling out “Nolly, Nolly,” before she even turned the corner of the street. You could put the kettle on when you heard him. She sewed him a little pageboy outfit to wear at her wedding. D’you remember that, Gilbert? D’you remember being a page boy?
—No, said Gilbert, smiling apologetically, shaking his head so that his white hair floated, starting to cut his ham into neat small pieces.
* * *
Zoe and fiona went to different secondary schools. zoe, along with Barbara and Pam and Neil Ashley and David Tew and a couple of others, sat the examination for free places to the Direct Grant schools. This little gang of clever ones had been marked apart from the rest of the junior school class almost since anyone could remember, given extra bits of work and spoken to differently. They carried the teachers’ aspirations, fulfilled their longings for tests and triumphs. The other children—Gary Lyons, Paul Andrews, June Fitch—were threatened that they would “end up at” Langham Road, which was the local comprehensive school, “if they carried on the way they were” (and they did indeed end up there, probably regardless of whether they had carried on or not).
It was never seriously suggested that Fiona might sit the examination and get a free place too. Everyone knew, Joyce said at home, that even the free places could be expensive enough once you had paid for the uniform, books, hockey boots, and tennis rackets. Children from poor “backgrounds” would find it difficult to “keep up” with the others (“background” was the euphemism then, conjuring an image of the tragic individual spotlighted against murky, indistinct tenements and slums). Fiona smiled and shrugged and said she didn’t fancy it, as if she put rather a low value on anything the Direct Grant schools could have to teach her, and saw alternative and more intriguing initiations ahead at Langham Road. Their separation seemed to Zoe a fitting and even a poetic thing; it kept her feelings for Fiona twisting poignantly in her heart. She thought of Amery-James, the all-girls school where she duly got her free place, as somehow belonging in her world of the subtle past, and Langham Road as modern and brash and present. At this threshold she felt as if she were submitting to a sacrificial destiny. Zoe’s mother and her Aunt Ann had also been to Amery-James, and her Great-aunt Vera had taught there for half a lifetime (she retired the year before Zoe started). She was taking up a place sanctified by tradition. It helped that the school was in an old eighteenth-century house with an oak staircase and stone-flagged floors, and that they had to buy her uniform in an old-fashioned department store on Clore Hill, where bills and payment and change were whisked around a system of pneumatic pipes to and from a glassed-in counting office. (The store was so expensive they couldn’t get everything they had meant to, and Joyce had to buy some of it later from the secondhand cupboard at the school.)
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Within a couple of weeks of beginning at Amery-James, Zoe felt differently. The rituals that were soothing to read about in books were irksome and depressing to live inside. Days were beset with pitfalls and anxieties: Had you remembered to hand in your maths homework on the right morning? Had your mother remembered to sew your name tape in your knickers in case there was a spot check? Had you returned your library books and brought in your science overall and your cakes for the cake sale for the Form Charity? Joyce found for Zoe a green mac that was not quite the green mac sanctioned by the uniform list. The teachers would pull her humiliatingly out of the crocodile of girls on their way to the sports field to lecture her on how it was unacceptable. She had to visit the secondhand cupboard again and buy a mac of the right kind.
Certain teachers, especially the older ones—Miss Webb, Miss Anstruther, Miss Langley—cultivated a game it was dangerous to become involved with, in which a brutal unsheathed cruelty (personal insults, contempt, a lashing loss of temper, shouting) would alternate with rewards, flashes of comradely inclusiveness, a calculated letting down of guards. The game’s brutality was sanctioned by the brutality of intellectual competition in the world outside, which was after all the raison d’être of the school. The physics teacher brought their marked homework into the classroom in three piles: good, acceptable, and unacceptable. The unacceptable pile wasn’t only of work done carelessly or incompletely; some of the girls had tried hard but simply not understood. The sheer burden of work seemed crushing. Under the school’s discipline Zoe learned French and Latin effectively (which no one seemed to do at Langham Road) and struggled with the most advanced Nuffield science teaching. Even though she liked English and her English teacher, the books she read there (George Eliot, Kipling, Robert Frost, Hopkins) were so contaminated for her by the place that she was not able to touch them again for years afterward. Every evening after school there were two or three hours of homework. In the lunch break, faced with an afternoon of maths and double Latin, Zoe’s heart would quail. It could not be endurable; surely something would give way. But of course it was endurable, it was only school and not real torture, and at last the clock would deliver up home time and the walk to the bus, which waited in a somnolent lull for twenty minutes on the suburban corner before it turned around for its return journey into town. Here at last was repose; in the gap before the driver started up the engine and the conductor came selling tickets, she sank into herself, dreaming, alone, hugging her briefcase on her knees, turning her head away if girls in green uniform got on.
In assembly and at commemoration services, the girls were addressed as if they were part of some ennobling crusade on behalf of enlightenment. Zoe was shocked to find herself bitterly and implacably opposed to the very principle of the place. She wasn’t much liked by the teachers or by many of the girls; she could see herself that there was something unattractive in how she cherished her apartness: unresponsive in class, refusing to be charmed when the teachers were funny and courted them, skeptical of the togetherness of the gangs of girls. One of the fiercest of the teachers, Miss Webb, with frozen pale blue eyes and white hair wound in a plait around her head, took passionately against her.
—I see Zoe Deare is wearing her usual charming scowl, she would say, enlisting the rest of the class on her side in a spatter of giggles and exchanged gleams of treacherous amusement. Do you have a pain, Zoe?
Zoe was absentminded, hopeless at remembering all those little details of preparation that could ensure an uneventful life at Amery-James. One day she had been supposed to bring a board and a plastic bag into Miss Webb’s geography class, where they were going to make clay models of a shadoof, an ancient Egyptian irrigation system. Miss Webb boiled over into a torrent of righteous chastisement when Zoe turned out to be the only one who had forgotten. She actually took her by the shoulders and backed her across the classroom, shaking her so that her hair bunches flew and berating her in panting breathy bursts. The class drank up the spectacle in hot-faced silence.
—Little sour-faced miss … lazy, sloppy, sulky attitude … your sort of girls don’t get anywhere in a school like this. Don’t think I don’t know your type!
—I don’t even want to! shouted Zoe in bewilderment. I don’t even like this school!
—And this school doesn’t like you very much, either!
After this episode, Ray and Joyce went to see the headmistress, and Zoe was taken out of Miss Webb’s class.
Later, much later, Zoe was able to appreciate that the lives of some of these teachers must have been pioneering in their dedication to women’s education. Some of them had no doubt sacrificed married life and family in order to keep their independence and pursue their careers; probably some of them, their names in gold up on the honors board in the hall, had been to university at a time when women were not even awarded degrees. Zoe’s own Great-aunt Vera, when she was at Amery-James, had been by all accounts (including her own) one of the fierce and arbitrary teachers, and yet Zoe liked her. She never quite found a way to explain to her great-aunt that she and Amery-James had found themselves incompatible. Vera had been so proud when she got her free place and had bought her the black leather briefcase she at first eagerly filled with books. With twinges of guilt, Zoe allowed her to think that she had become one of those girls who romped and cheered and belonged. It was a revelation anyway, when her aunt talked, to hear the teachers referred to by their first names: Jennie Anstruther, Ruth Marsh (the English teacher Zoe liked), Beth Webb. Behind their school shapes they sounded suddenly girlish and tentative and incomplete. She never told Aunt Vera about her quarrel with Miss Webb. At least she could safely report her marks, which were always rather surprisingly good, considering how her teachers despaired of her.
Zoe’s family moved again at the end of her first year, this time to a tall Hilltop terraced house that had been a girl students’ residence, so that it had gas rings in every room and a rope fire escape wound on a red-painted reel in a bathroom with five sinks. (Joyce dedicated herself energetically, indefatigably, to her vision of its transformation; she made it beautiful.) From the new house it was only a fifteen minute walk to Fiona’s; she and Zoe made lingering transitions between their homes, looking together in all the shop windows on Clore Hill at things they planned to save for: felt pens, autograph books, sewing sets (Zoe), those electric lights filled with slowly moving blobs of different-colored oils (Fiona). They bought licorice and Parma Violets in the sweet shop.
Fiona listened to Zoe’s tales of Miss Webb.
—I don’t know how she’d get on at our school, she said. The boys are terrible for mucking about.
—Are they? asked Zoe, with a voluptuous inner shudder. What do they do? What do they do exactly?
She longed for mucking about. She even thought tenderly of Paul Andrews and his banging desk lids.
—Nicking pencil cases and chucking them around, said Fiona. Or flicking stuff, chewed-up lumps of paper and things. The latest is trying to set fire to their haversacks. It’s pretty boring.
To Zoe, whose lessons mostly passed in a subdued silence, this sounded as exciting as a carnival.
* * *
Zoe, who had been such an easy child, became moody and distant at home. Joyce found in her bedroom lugubrious messages she had written to herself for the first day of the holiday. “Appreciate to the full this wonderful day of freedom. How lucky you are. Six whole weeks! Don’t waste this precious time.” From Ray’s vantage point in his new first floor studio, spacious and full of good light, he could see his green-clad daughter plod into view at half past four every afternoon, weighed down with her briefcase, snuffed under her horrible hat. He mourned the bossy bouncing child she had been, full of schemes and passions. Joyce and he agreed that she didn’t have to stay on at the ghastly place. He rather liked the idea of taking his daughter out of the school everyone else was trying to get their daughters into; after all, they were Labour voters and supposed to believe in a state education system.
> —Daniel seems perfectly happy at Langham Road, said Joyce. (When he started there Zoe had been two years at Amery-James and showed no signs of coming round to it.) Every evening if it wasn’t raining, Daniel was out with his friends in the park, playing football or cricket according to the season.
—He certainly doesn’t seem overburdened with homework.
—He’s a late developer, Joyce reassured him. You just wait. There are great depths in Daniel.
—I’ll take your word for it. They certainly haven’t been much plumbed so far. He hasn’t spoken a word to me for weeks.
It was true that if Ray passed him on the stairs Daniel actually startled, as if his father were something sinister whose existence he preferred to forget. If Ray addressed any remark to him directly, Daniel mumbled at his shoes. He never brought his friends into the house; Ray suspected this was because he didn’t want them to catch sight of his paintings. In the park, Ray knew, he was a different creature: mouthy and caustic, popular, with his mass of fair curls and easy gift for sport. His offside drive was already better than Ray’s had ever been.
Zoe brooded gloomily over the possibility of leaving Amery-James.
—But what if I don’t fit in at the new school? she asked accusingly. At Langham Road they all wear makeup and go out with boys.
—Wherever you go you will be your same self, Joyce consoled her. Anyway, I don’t expect they “all” do.
—They go out dancing at the Locarno.
—That might be nice.
Zoe gave her a dark look.
—What if I’m ruined for either school?
—It’s up to you, darling. We don’t mind one way or the other.
—How am I supposed to know? she wailed.
Ray suffered for his daughter; Joyce was brisk.
—What more can we do? She shrugged. She has to decide for herself.
